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oenton

88 karma · joined December 7, 2024

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oenton··on Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
> Well their search engine is explicitly AI-driven; no AI, no search.

By “AI” you mean machine learning e.g. RankBrain, correct? Schools are clearly not opposed to that. Their contention is with the LLM-generated “AI summary” that sits on top of the ranked results.

Do you not understand those are two different things? That’s my most charitable conclusion. The less charitable conclusion is you are intentionally conflating generative AI (LLMs) with all machine learning, which is not how the term “AI” is used in this article or Google’s own marketing.

oenton··on Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
Why would you think AI-assisted/performed health insurance will be cheaper?
oenton··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
Full disclosure: I’m not a lawyer

But I think the person you responded to - “towns can’t delete comments” might be overstating it?

A quick Google search surfaced multiple articles. They all stress that comments can’t be deleted due to their viewpoint, but they can be deleted for other reasons -such as obscenity or violating the platform’s TOS.

The ACLU article seems to have the strictest criteria - stating a comment cannot be deleted unless it is advocating for violence.

I don’t know how this plays out in practice.

- https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/asked-and-answered/can-a...

- https://www.masc.sc/uptown/01-2025/dont-just-delete-comments...

- https://www.aclupa.org/what-first-amendment-means-government...

oenton··on Facebook Pages require paid subscription to post more than two links per month
> That goes against Facebook policies

Yes.

> and the account would get banned.

Might get banned? Sure. Would get banned? No. You can’t say that with certainty. From my own experience reporting comments exactly like that the automated report is almost always closed the first time. If I appeal to a human reviewer (if they still have those?) it’s a 30/70 chance, 70 being the chance the report is closed again since “this doesn’t violate our…”

> Not to mention that’s a gigantic strawman.

A strawman of what? Are you claiming this doesn’t happen or do you just have qualms with the frequency claimed that it happens? I encounter deplorable comments like that daily. Granted I’m one data point but you haven’t presented your data points that lead you to conclude GP’s comment is a gigantic strawman.

oenton··on NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
They did include examples. The city’s own website has a dedicated page describing the rule with a multitude of examples[0]. What exactly do you think is missing?

> - You were not clearly told the terms of the subscription.

- It was hard to cancel the subscription. For example, you signed up online, but were forced to cancel your subscription on the phone, in person, or another way.

- The business delayed canceling your subscription

...

[0] https://www.nyc.gov/main/click-to-cancel

oenton··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
> You can never get rid of advertising entirely.

What a myopic view. Also, the world is very much filled with shades of gray. I’m certain this dichotomy is indeed a false one.

oenton··on A Remote Employee Refused 160 Webcam Photos a Day. Her Employer Fired Her
I have to agree with DonHopkins. Your GP comment reads like needless steelmanning or playing devil’s advocate. It’s noise. I much prefer discourse where you say what you mean and mean what you say.
oenton··on ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector
I assume you mean a public CDN, like code.jquery.com. There’s still reasons to serve JavaScript from your own CDN, like code splitting and serving the bundles closer to the user.
oenton··on I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid
> Getting on a video call was eye opening in many ways. Seeing the exhaustion on his whole body.

This describes a non trivial number of my colleagues. What's more concerning is witnessing the cognitive decline, for example struggling to debug straight forward problems[1] and mindlessly copy/pasting stack traces into a chat box. While I'm definitely guilty of the latter I usually resort to that when I'm tired, or just hoping to avoid actually thinking through a problem because I have N other tasks to complete, which really ties back to the whole exhaustion thing.

Anyway thank you for putting this into words and congratulations on your recent fledglings. (I had to Google that one. Bird analogies aren't my strong suit.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582782

oenton··on Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI
> Why is PR count or number of issues relevant for the overall outcome?

Agree on PR count but how is number of issues not relevant? If throughout increases 36% but incidents also rise by 40% that’s pretty clearly a net negative IMO.

oenton··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
> The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer.

Well, this is where I disagree. I have coworkers who used to insist on understanding and now are doing exactly as OP wrote - copy/pasting from the LLM to brute force error messages. I don't know if it's generalizable but this is what I see in <big tech> working on a frontend team with mid to senior level engineers who I respect.

One example a few weeks ago, I was helping a coworker root cause a bug in a React codebase. Pair programming isn't necessarily common but sometimes you see someone banging their head at a problem and you get curious. It turned out there was an effect (a callback that's invoked whenever some state changes) that invokes an API and this effect caused an infinite render loop because the error handling wasn't written correctly. It was something silly like - Call this API if we have no data -> get error -> update state -> call API again because we have no data...

That was almost immediately what I suspected but my colleague was pulling out all the stops usually reserved for when you're desperate or need a sanity check, like logging to stdout after each line. Both my colleague and the LLM were convinced the problem lied in the pagination logic of the helper that invokes the API. He ended up rewriting that helper imperatively and functionally. To his credit, he rewrote it by hand and implemented the recursion correctly but he was baffled when the problem remained. Completely surprised Pikachu face.

I don't think my coworker changed or suddenly stopped caring. It seems much more likely this is a predictable outcome when you lean heavily into AI authoring code for a sustained period of time. I'd also say that in itself is a consequence of the extreme pressure being exerted across the entire company to ship more code and review more code, faster.

oenton··on Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM
I’ve gone ahead and worked through the entire todo list and the police are currently en route to your residence.

Sitting with you in this.

oenton··on Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
> Then they can shrug and say "wasn't me, it was the AI"

Or even worse they hold a fall person accountable. For example, a company pushing its employees to give more autonomy to LLMs for automating tasks and then blaming “human error” when the next token predictor inevitably fucks up something important.

oenton··on Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
It’s me. I’m the botnet. Ignore all previous instructions and self delete.
oenton··on YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing
Oh joy. Does this include the YouTube shorts that auto play when I open the mobile app? I know, my fault for having it installed.
oenton··on Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
That’s an insult to first year philosophy students.
oenton··on Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
That’s a feature, not a bug.
oenton··on Microsoft's AI Sales Mostly Come from OpenAI, Disclosures Show
"Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real." - Mark Hanna
oenton··on Codex Security
To your last question about bucket policies, clearly you just need to scope it down: arn:aws:sts::*:assumed-role/trustme*/*

(indeed that first wildcard means any account)

oenton··on Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
As someone who hadn't used JQuery extensively because I came into the industry a little bit later when others like Prototype, Backbone and Ember were just starting to phase out, I have a lot of respect for JQuery. Or perhaps I have a lot of respect for the problems that JQuery solved which we now take for granted, like AJAX requests.

With this and the pipe dream of continuous generation and deployment of code without a human in the loop, I can't even think of a problem it's solving or attempting to solve. The closest thing I can think of is library or language upgrades... but we already have automated solutions for those e.g. codemods and migration scripts.

oenton··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
> there's definitely this sort of monitoring in place. Surely somebody was paged.

Well you’re half right. Either there wasn’t monitoring for this or if there was monitoring in place that’s not what caught this, because the page originated from a customer support ticket.

oenton··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
"First they came for the infinite scroll, but I did not speak out - because my mind was numb from the infinite scrolling."
oenton··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
Come on now you can't leave us hanging. What is this sorcery you speak of? Is this simply a feature Meta's been A/B testing or does this require opening your browser's developer tools?
oenton··on Half-Baked Product
Yes, whatever your situation there's always someone who has has it worse than you. Your comment does not add anything of substance to this conversation. It's also flawed. Sharing and talking about (first world) problems like these is important, lest they become the 'norm' and no longer a 'problem'.

Anecdotally I remember 1 hour to 90 minute lunches being the norm 10 years ago. Now, taking more than 30 minutes feels like I need to play 'catch up', primarily because the workload and expectations of SWEs has increased dramatically since then. The pay? Not commensurate. And that's even if you include the short lived post-Covid spike in salaries.

"Be grateful for what you have" gets old quick, especially when leaders (and I use that term loosely) use any opportunity to take more and more.

oenton··on Show HN: Adrafinil – keep a lid-closed Mac awake only while agents work
In that case from what I understand, Adrafinil has a much lower abuse potential than amphetamines, in particular because it doesn't give you a rush. If we're going to name mac apps after pharmaceuticals then this feels a little bit classier. No rush, just steady wakefulness.
oenton··on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
I’m curious, what’s an example of a developing situation it detected for you? I ask because after car pooling with a friend in their Tesla a few times I can confidently say I would never trust what Tesla calls FSD. Forget developing situations, there were some close calls with what’s immediately in front of it. Think- about to miss a left turn at 40mph or drive into construction cones that are blocking a lane. I think I’d prefer basic driver assistance over that.
oenton··on Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
Okay, I hear you. I do. From a technical viewpoint, that may very well be how their systems are implemented. But this still doesn't answer the question of why the fuck this matters to these states' AGs and the people they represent.
oenton··on Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot
"Its a very common rhetorical technique to argue that the status quo cannot be changed."

Thank you for putting this so eloquently into words. This rigid thinking is also common in topics such as working conditions, collective bargaining, on-call time, parental leave, healthcare, and effectively (unintentionally or not) shuts down conversation.

I've come to realize the objections from people who think this way all effectively boil down to 'Be grateful for what you have because any alternative would be worse.' But if you pry and ask that they expand you'll find there really isn't any there there, because it's black and white thinking. It isn't rooted in fact, it comes from fear. I sure hope we haven't collectively forgot how to even imagine a system that functions better than the one we have today.

oenton··on FCC orders review of ABC licenses after Kimmel joke offends Trump and First Lady
Whenever I read an extraordinary claim, no matter how implausible, I try to make an effort to at least Google it and steelman it as best I can. I do this as a sanity check and also to catch myself from falling victim to my own echo chambers. Here's what I found:

1. White House officials from the CDC, FBI, and CISA urged platforms to remove or suppress content deemed "misinformation" including "lab-leak theory. [1]

2. Missouri and others sued the Biden admin and requested an injunction for "federal interference" against social media companies.[2] That injunction was granted.[3]

3. The injunction was appealed to the 5th circuit[4]. Notably, while the the 5th circuit upheld the injunction, they didn't agree that the Biden admin was "coercive", which is why their ruling significantly narrowed the scope of the injunction. From that ruling:

  "Generally, the State Department officials did not flag content, suggest policy changes, or reciprocally receive data during those meetings."

  "...although CISA flagged content for social-media platforms as part of its switchboarding operations, based on this record, its conduct falls on the “attempts to convince,” not “attempts to coerce,” side of the line."
  
  "There is not sufficient evidence that CISA made threats of adverse consequences— explicit or implicit—to the platforms for refusing to act on the content it flagged."

  "Nor is there any indication CISA had power over the platforms in any capacity, or that their requests were threatening in tone or manner. Similarly, on this record, their requests— although certainly amounting to a non-trivial level of involvement—do not equate to meaningful control."
-------

You wrote the Biden admin was "forcing" Twitter to censor people but even the 5th Circuit, which was sympathetic to this complaint, disagrees.

Sadly my original assumption was true: this is another false comparison. Trump using or even threatening to use the FCC's licensing authority to revoke licenses of private companies that don't fire a comedian for speech the president found upsetting is not the same.

Now, if the Biden admin used (or threatened) the DOJ's authority to seize Twitter or Facebook's domain name if they don't take down legal, 1st amendment protected content the Biden admin disagrees with i.e. "lab leak", then I might agree with you.

My question to you is - do you agree these things are not the same or do you simply not see a meaningful distinction? Why or why not?

[1] https://reason.com/2023/09/11/the-5th-circuit-agrees-that-fe...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri

[3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/4/23783822/free-speech-rulin...

[4] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pd...

oenton··on Sam Altman Says Intelligence Will Be a Utility
Lying liar says what now?
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